Lady Romeo

by Tana Wojczuk

  It was a stunning letter for a performer to write, much less a female one.

  Charlotte understood her value as an American star—and she made sure others knew it. “I purpose coming to America in August next,” she wrote to Price around 1848, “and shall begin to work in October.” The plan, she stated, was simple: “Gallop through the country as fast as I can. And make as much money as I can.” She demanded nothing less than what her male costars Forrest and Macready were making, “a clear half the house each night.”

  Charlotte’s plans were coming together. There was just one complication: a new flame named Matilda Hays, “Max” to her friends. Max was a writer who had made a successful career as the English translator for George Sand. Sand was the nom de plume of the French writer Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, a prolific and popular novelist and playwright infamous for leaving her husband for an actress. Her subsequent affairs with both men and women were well publicized, and her translator was equally progressive in her relationships. Slim and tall, Max dressed like a man of letters in button-up shirts and bow ties.

  At first, Charlotte wooed Max by convincing her to appear alongside her as her new Juliet. For a few months Charlotte gave Max acting lessons and they performed their budding love in public. Max initially agreed to the arrangement because she needed the money, but her interest in acting was temporary, and she quickly gave up the role for that of Charlotte’s offstage wife. Their romantic relationship was never acknowledged by the press, who referred to them always as friends or acquaintances, when they mentioned Max at all. But it was not a secret. When Charlotte and Max went out together to parties or dinners it was as a couple, dressed nearly identically in collared shirts, ties, waistcoats, and skirts to the floor.

  When the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning met Charlotte and Max in Rome, she was disturbed and excited by their relationship.

  “I forgot to tell you that we met Miss Cushman, the American actress,” Elizabeth reported to her sister, Arabella. “She was with her Miss Hays.” The two went everywhere together, she noted. “They live together, dress alike… it is a female marriage.” Though Elizabeth was shocked by this, a sophisticated friend assured her the relationship was “by no means uncommon.”

  Female marriages, however, were expected to be chaste, and female passion was never discussed in public. A woman who loved other women too fiercely could be treated as a novelty, or, as the horrific novel The Female Husband warned, she could be hunted down and whipped in the public square. Charlotte and Max had to be careful. This would be particularly true in America, which was even more puritanical than Victorian England.

  Max resisted going with Charlotte on the American tour because it would mean putting off the translation work she had already delayed. Ultimately, though, she gave in and Charlotte released to the press the news of her triumphant return to her native land. Newspapers in America reported giddily that Miss Cushman, “the greatest American Actress,” was finally returning, accompanied by “her friend, Miss Hays.”

  * * *

  The America Charlotte returned to in 1849 was more volatile than the one she had left. Former president Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act in 1830 had led to the state-sanctioned murder of nearly four thousand Cherokees and the displacement of many thousands more. Nearly eighty thousand white men were now traveling through what was once Indian land to reach gold country in the unincorporated lands of the Far West. The Mexican-American War had just ended, and many enslaved African-Americans were fleeing north on the Underground Railroad. The Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York had rallied many thousands around women’s rights. There, the writer and intellectual—and former slave—Frederick Douglass made an eloquent speech linking women’s suffrage to universal suffrage for people of all races. And yet hostilities between the North and South were rising.

  In New York, the Astor Place Riots shocked the country. The tragedy began in May with a feud between William Macready and Edwin Forrest over competing performances of Macbeth. Macready disliked Forrest. He thought the bombastic actor unrefined and brutish, but he failed to appreciate how much Forrest meant to his working-class supporters in America. When Macready disparaged Forrest in a newspaper, it sounded to American ears very much like the kind of insults they’d endured from the British since the nation’s founding. The wealthy, British Macready represented everything the working-class audiences detested. Forrest was playing to a mixed audience at the Bowery, while Macready was performing at the new Astor Place Opera House, an opulent, expensive venue created expressly to keep out the lower classes. When some of Macready’s supporters came to Forrest’s Macbeth and hissed at him from the audience, it was the last straw. A group of Bowery Boys—always Forrest supporters—plotted to disrupt Macready’s performance of Macbeth at the Astor Place Opera House. This protest, however, was met by the National Guard, whose presence inflamed the protest into a riot. Guardsmen fired on their own people, killing thirty. If it was, as some said, a restaging of the Revolutionary War, it was also a struggle over whether the rich or poor would have the right to define American culture. Some called it “the Shakespeare Riot.”

  Perhaps because of the growing ideological divisions in America, the nation was hungrier than ever for theatre. As railroad lines extended into St. Louis, Chicago, Minneapolis, and farther west, theatre troupes found a new way to access the American interior. There was more money to be made by performing the same show in city after city than by casting, rehearsing, and mounting a new production every few weeks, and Charlotte planned to use this approach with her own work. She already had a repertoire of successful characters with Lady Macbeth, Meg Merrilies, Nancy, Hamlet, and Romeo, and once she cast the other parts she knew she could make the same great dish a hundred times without fail. She was recognized everywhere she went, and with railways and newspapers expanding far across the nation, her name and reputation traveled ahead of her. It was time for her talents to come home.

  * * *

  One rough, cold winter afternoon, a train nicknamed the Hercules was traveling from Logansport to Chicago on the Chicago and Great Eastern Railroad. It was, the captain recalled, a bad day for crossing the prairies “with the wind blowing over them as I believe it never blows anywhere else except off Lake Michigan.” Suddenly, he received an order to hold the train at the station while two more cars were added to its load. The Hercules was strong enough, but the captain was baffled. He’d never received such an order before. Far in the distance a little engine towed the two additional cars toward the train. When they arrived, the Hercules passengers were surprised to see the great tragedienne Charlotte Cushman disembark with her attendants. She had missed a connection somewhere and needed to arrive in Chicago in time for that night’s performance. She traveled in style, with her “belongings”—both her family and friends as well as her luggage and costumes—filling both cars.

  Though the captain did his best with the late start, the headwinds got the better of him and “out on the open prairie, about four o’clock on the gray November afternoon, we came to a dead halt.” The captain picked up his oil can and heaved the door open against the wind, struggling to reach the engine room, as a gust thrust him backward each time he made progress. Finally he gave up and dropped to his hands and knees, crawling back the way he’d come. “Presently,” the captain recounted, “one of the brakemen, with his hat tied to his head with a stout scarf” to keep it from blowing away “came forward to tell me that Miss Cushman wished to see the engineer in the passenger car.”

  He declined, sending word that he was doing all he could and they’d be moving again soon. But then the fireman, Mike, whistled in his ear: “An it is herself that is coming now be jabers!” The captain looked out of the window, and there was Charlotte, advancing through the gale along the side of the train. “At first she walked majestically forward, the wind storm seeming to have no impact on her stout, erect figure; but soon she began to cling to the sides of the cars, her ample skirts blowing back, making any
thing but a graceful or dignified appearance.” When she finally reached the cab, the captain and fireman helped her up inside it. Safe from the wind, Charlotte stormed about the delay. “She tried high tragedy with me,” said the captain, but he assured her that the engine only needed time to rest: “After Hercules has had time to breathe a little I think he will take us on again. I imagine he will find working ahead of old Boreas,” the Greek God of the North Wind and winter, “to be a harder matter than any of the labors of his immortal namesake.” Charlotte was amused by the classical reference and could not hide her surprise that the captain was familiar with the old myths.

  Warming to the task, Charlotte tried more “honeyed” words with the captain, who “felt the power of her personal magnetism.” “She had put new life into me, and it seemed as if the Hercules drew strength from my touch, for the steam-gauge ran up to almost blowing-off.” Charlotte went back to her car, grabbing the step guards just before she was blown past the train entirely.

  As the train began to move, the captain looked back and saw Charlotte watching him through the top window of the smoking car. She nodded and smiled at him, “her great eyes agleam with excitement and a look of suppressed power in her face I never saw lined on any human countenance.”

  When they arrived in Chicago, Charlotte came to say goodbye. She asked the captain where he was staying and his room number and shook his “grimy” hand “as cordially as if it had been dressed in immaculate kid” leather. Half an hour later the captain was settling in to his rooms when a messenger arrived with two tickets to Charlotte’s performance that night. The captain remembered until the end of his life watching Charlotte perform and seeing her notice him and nod from the stage.

  * * *

  Traveling from New York to Chicago to St. Louis, Charlotte continued to see success in each city, her popularity growing beyond even her imagination. She tried out a new role, Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII, and this, too, was a hit. When she turned east again for her triumphant hometown return to Boston, she was celebrated as an American hero. In Boston, she was delighted to be introduced to the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Just a few years earlier Charlotte had written lines from Longfellow’s novel Hyperion in her diary, and now he was calling on her, writing a play for her to star in. The two became friends, bonding over their admiration of the German composer Mendelssohn, and their mutual friend Samuel Laurence. Longfellow and Max became acquainted as well, discussing literature in English and French. Longfellow’s passion for his wife, Frances, bloomed as wildly as the lilacs outside their house, and he noticed, in contrast, that Max had a “vague sense of sadness… some bitterness, as of disappointment.”

  Charlotte, too, worried about Max’s happiness, even as she could not ensure it. The decision to leave England had been painful. Some of Max’s friends, suspicious of this new relationship, accused Charlotte of “selfishly sacrificing” Max’s happiness to her own. One friend in particular behaved so inappropriately that Charles Dickens jumped in to defend Charlotte “very prettily,” reminding the woman that Max’s decision was none of her business.

  Toward the end of the tour, Charlotte and Max posed for a photo as a souvenir. Dressed alike in bow ties and men’s waistcoats, they look in opposite directions, tired and tight-lipped.

  While privately struggling to keep her relationship together, publicly Charlotte was enjoying unprecedented levels of national fame. As Macready had predicted, the “foreign stamp of approbation” gave Americans the permission they needed to like her. She had become an “empress,” “nodding but to be obeyed, smiling but to be worshipped.” She was talented, intelligent, independent, and now rich, demanding equal pay to Macready and Forrest, two of the most famous actors in the world.

  For the first time, America had a true celebrity of its own. Newspapermen dined out on her, reporting where she went and with whom. In Brooklyn, Walt Whitman reprinted a notice from the Cleveland Plain Dealer that Charlotte had been spotted leaving her hotel in the resort town of Sault Saint Marie in men’s clothes. Whitman was delighted:

  Miss Charlotte Cushman, who is spending a quiet vacation in that inspiring clime, astonished the guests of the St. Marie Hotel one morning by appearing equipped cap-a-pie in masculine attire—hat, coat, unmentionables and all. You who have seen her personation of ‘Hamlet’ can easily understand the grace and ease with which she wore her new ‘toggery.’ Here was a single motive of triumph; not a mere desire to astonish the dinner table, and then, like the ghost of Banquo, to vanish away and go back to petticoats and whalebone. No, she rode in it; and for ought that we can learn, had determined to wear it for the remainder of her days—at least, of her maidenhood.

  Charlotte’s cross-dressing was not a stunt, Whitman realized, it was an expression of her true self. Whitman also made a sly nod to Charlotte’s sexuality, predicting she would continue dressing like a man for the rest of her life, or her maidenhood (which for a woman who loved other women was essentially the same thing).

  Though Charlotte sought success, celebrity wore her down, and she sometimes felt like a “thousand mouths (were) feeding on me.” She responded by surrounding herself with an entourage of female friends: ambitious, unorthodox artists like herself who longed for more freedom than they could find in America or in England. Soon, she had a new dream.

  In Boston, she and Max befriended two new women: Grace Greenwood, the New York Times’s first female reporter, and an up-and-coming young sculptor named Harriet Hosmer. Hosmer had quickly fallen for Charlotte after seeing her as Romeo, and continued to see her perform as Lady Macbeth, Meg Merrilies, Hamlet, Queen Katharine in Henry VIII, and many others. The quartet called themselves the “Jolly Bachelors,” and, not content merely to dream of artistic freedom, they decided to take the radical step of making a home together in Rome.

  Charlotte had flirted with Bohemianism in England, but this would be her first attempt at creating her own artistic community. Artists and writers were flocking to Italy to live luxuriously in inexpensive villas and enjoy more personal and creative freedom than at home. Max imagined herself finishing the translation of George Sand’s La Petite Fadette, which she had only been able to peck away at on tour. Grace had an idea for a novel, and Harriet would immerse herself in studying masterpieces of classical sculpture. It was less clear what Charlotte would do, but she believed she was done with the stage forever. At thirty-three she was independently wealthy and an international celebrity. What she wanted now was a home in Rome with Max and her closest friends around her.

  chapter twelve Rome

  The buskers’ cries followed Charlotte as she passed under the obelisk in the Piazza del Popolo, the People’s Square. Turning onto the Via del Corso, Rome’s busiest thoroughfare, she passed into the shade of candy-colored buildings that rose on either side. By the time Charlotte and her friends moved there in 1852, Rome had become a popular tourist destination. It was spring, and white, star-shaped blossoms emerged among the glossy leaves of mock orange trees. Music drifted out of open windows as Charlotte walked south, following the sound of water. Ten minutes later she arrived at Bernini’s Fontana della Barcaccia at the foot of the Spanish Steps.

  The steps were white and steep as the cliffs at Dover; pausing for breath at the top, one had a view from the muddy Tiber River to the crumbling travertine of the Colosseum. Clouds of swallows wheeled and shrieked like tragedians. Charlotte looked around her, at the streets of her new home. She now lived down the street from the Villa Medici, the former home of the powerful family who bankrolled the Renaissance.

  Though she had retired from the stage for the time being, Charlotte continued working behind the scenes, using her fame to find patrons for her friends. She had moved to Rome with Max, Grace, and Harriet, but the community grew as she began to support more women artists, offering them a place to stay in Rome, extending loans, giving gifts, and writing letters on their behalf to her powerful connections. Under her care, the “Jolly Bachelors” flourished.

 
* * *

  Growing up in Massachusetts, Harriet Hosmer endured tragedy early in her life. When she was a child, her mother and siblings all died suddenly, leaving her alone with her terrified father. A physician, he was desperate to protect his one remaining child from illness and created a strenuous daily exercise regimen for young Hattie. Dr. Hosmer raised her largely as he would a boy, and she grew up confident and strong. After she beat all the neighborhood boys racing up and down a nearby hill, they renamed it “Mount Hosmer” in her honor. She also showed early promise as an artist, starting with sketching and painting, then moving on to sculpture—which became her passion. Hattie knew that to become a great sculptor she needed to study live anatomy, which meant nude models. But as a woman she was not allowed to enter any of the academies let alone look at naked men and women. Finding the artistic climate of New England stifling, she begged her father to let her move with her new friend Charlotte Cushman to Rome. There, she argued, she could study classical sculpture, join the male artists in sketching from nude models, and be taken more seriously as a sculptor. Dr. Hosmer could not refuse.